Genre: Humorous Fiction
Description:
“Midlife demands some reckoning and Eric realizes he can wait no
longer. As Eric hurtles headlong toward the big 5-0, he realizes there is
unfinished business and is determined to find his childhood friends, convince
them to form their own rock and roll band, and to go on tour! He searches out
Todd, Laurel, and Lorelei so he can fulfill that dream. The story of four
Midwestern grown-ups and their childhood desires to create No Way Back Today
in the face of improbable odds and middle age will have you both laughing and
cheering as you recognize your own unfulfilled dreams. No Way Back Today
is an epic, '80s-fueled rock-and-roll escapade for a band that never was!”
Author:
“Eric Shoars is a serial storyteller who considers the English language
his playground and who never met a pun he didn’t like. Eric is a modern day
Walter Mitty with a serious twist. His writing style is best described as ‘fly
on the wall’ putting the reader in the shoes of the lead character experiencing
what he does as he does. Getting in a person's head and finding out what drives
them, what makes them do what they do is tremendously fascinating. The drama we
find in art often pales to the drama of real life.
Shoars' fiction works include No Way Back Today and The
Sunshine Affair series.
Shoars' non-fiction works include Women Under Glass: The Secret
Nature of Glass Ceilings and The Steps to Overcome Them and Evil Does
Not Have The Last Word.”
Appraisal:
Although Eric (the protagonist of this book, not to be confused with
Eric the author) is a member of Gen X (the generation between the Baby Boomers
and the Millennials) and I think he would say this book is especially aimed at
that generation. I agree, it would resonate the most with that generation, but depending
on whose definition of the specific birth years that fit in each generation
some (possibly a significant number) of the Baby Boomers are going to find this
book resonates with them. At least I did. Odds are if you were born in most of
the ‘50s, at any point in the ‘60s or ‘70s, and even a bit into the ‘80s (the end
of Gen X) this story is likely to strike a chord. Some of you kids in the
Millennial generation might learn something and be amused by the old fogies and
the lessons they learned in this story as well.
In spite of being fiction, No Way Back
Today feels like a memoir in many ways. The inclusion of real people (Joan
Jett and Ellen DeGeneres for two examples) into the story in realistic ways (at
least as realistic as the rest of the story) adds to that feeling. Real places
(for example the venues like the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa and First
Avenue, the real club in Minneapolis) adds to the real feel, at least for those
familiar with these places. Even though the story is fiction and humorous, the more
serious lessons someone might take away from it if it were a memoir still
stand. Among those lessons are that it doesn’t have to be too late to make your
dreams come true and that the time to do that is probably right now.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 85-90,000 words
No comments:
Post a Comment